Solo Challenges

Although Madden Ultimate Team is primarily a competitive mode, players who do not wish to play against others can take part in hundreds of Solo Challenges. You can earn some very valuable, rare cards in solo challenges as well, such as legend cards that can then be used in Connected Franchises, so you'll want to check them out.

When starting Ultimate Team the first time this year, you'll be forced to play a solo challenge against the Baltimore Ravens. It'll be a little tough due to the Ravens' solid team talent, but the game is set on an easy difficulty, so you should be all right. Win or lose, once you pass it, you can deal with setting up your roster and the play the challenges however you wish.

Make no mistake: there are a lot of challenges, with new ones that come every week. The real meat is in the "Regular Season" challenges. Here, you can mimic the first half of any team's real-world 2013 NFL schedule with your own Ultimate Team. So for example, you can play the Houston Texans season, with their first three games against the San Diego Chargers, Tennessee Titans, and Baltimore Ravens, then switch and play the regular season of the Green Bay Packers.

Every Solo Challenge earns you a set amount of coins; all games are 2- or 3-minute quarters (so they'll be very quick), and they're on set difficulty levels. They're also against the teams' default rosters, so at first, your Ultimate Team may facing very strong competition unless you're facing the likes of the Cleveland Browns or St. Louis Rams. Unlike last year, you'll see what the difficulty is on the challenge selection screen; you may want to avoid All-Pro and All-Madden difficulties until your team is in the 80s overall with good Chemistry.

You can opt to do any solo challenge in any order, provided you've done all the games before it in the sequence. For example, you can play Games 1 and 2 of Baltimore's season, then do the first three games of the Dallas Cowboys' regular season. You cannot, however, play the Cincinnati Bengals' Game 8 of their regular season until you play all 7 games before it.

Solo challenges can only be completed for rewards once, and every attempt before you succeed takes a game off your Player Contracts. If you repeat a challenge after you win it, you won't be rewarded, but you won't lose contract games either. It becomes a practice, but a fairly pointless one.

Given that there are 32 teams, and that each team has its own regular season you can do, that means there are 256 Solo Challenges in the Season category alone, probably enough to keep you playing for the rest of the year and then some. Weekly challenges, including against squads chosen from the Madden Community, will be available as well. There shouldn't be a reason to repeat any challenge once you've got the reward for it.

The coin values for all Solo Challenges are respectable, and you can even earn entire packs from doing them. However, you stand to gain more coins overall if you face human competition, so unless you're just card-collecting, you'll want to take your game online.

Note that Solo Challenges are not the same thing as taking on the AI in a single head-to-head exhibition match. You can do that with your Ultimate Team, but the coin reward will be much lower, especially because you're given a "Played against the AI" penalty. That penalty doesn't apply to Solo Challenges, but Solo Challenges always give a set amount of coins, rather than rewarding you for your overall performance.

Coin rewards against low-skilled human opponents are equivalent to medium- and high-skilled AI opponents, so at first, you might want to take on the AI for a few practice matches. In the long term however, facing human opponents is where the cash is at.